Where does this man get off? (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Measles, misinformation, a “hitting vigorously‘of misogyny – whether women like it or not – a violent fantasy with nine weapons for political enemies, rudeness, petty insults and cronyism.
Choose your perversion, America. His final hours of campaigning show that Donald Trump is betting that enough of us want this.
Friday night Trump simulated a sex act with a microphone, after suggesting he would “kick the shit out of the people backstage” who he blamed because that microphone wasn’t working his way. The media was obsessed with Trump’s all day suggestion that former Rep. Liz Cheney, who is campaigning against him and supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, should be shot.
The spectacle and back-and-forth over whether he was describing a firing squad or — as his surrogates claim — merely sending it to fight in wars she has supported may seem like a damaging distraction for a campaign nearing its end. But they are actually Trump’s target.
He says something mean. He provokes his followers with viscerally violent images. And then he watches as shocked Republicans run to the cameras to explain that this was, in fact, completely normal. He wants to be the center of attention. He wants to shock. He believes this will endear him to voters who can’t stomach the status quo.
Over the past week, Trump continued to denigrate Kamala Harris, calling her “low IQ” and “dumb as a rock.” It’s a typical Trump response to the yawning gender gap: insulting Harris while telling women that — after being legally found guilty of sexual assault — he will protect women “whether they like it or not.” Trump continued on Saturday to talk about women as objects in need of his protection: home alone, vulnerable to marauding migrants coming to kill them in their kitchens. “Women need to be protected when they are at home in the suburbs,” he says declared. At another meeting on Friday, he basked in their perceived gratitude for him: “the housewives in the suburbs love me.”
Of course, men being condescending to women and insulting women were just background noise at last week’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. The headline show was a comedian’s disparagement of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of trash.” Trump didn’t seem to like that after it became a political problem for him.
But after a week of refusing to apologize to the Puerto Rican community, Trump simply said rejected It. On Saturday, he called the episode “one comedian” who “told one joke.”
“He mentioned Puerto Rico and they made a big deal out of it,” Trump said in a phone call with Fox News.
While there is much debate about whether Trump is experiencing cognitive decline and has become disinhibited, we need to be clear about what is happening in the home stretch of the campaign: these are choices that Trump is making. He knows how to behave well enough when he wants to, and he has chosen not to. He acts this way because he thinks he can, because he believes it works, because it does has worked.
TRUMP IS MORE POPULAR AFTER TRYING to steal an election and inciting an insurrection. With two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions and four criminal charges, Trump’s approval rating has grown and he has new converts among the young and non-white members, union members and Jewish Americans.
He is well positioned to win. And he trusts that’s what voters want it, and all its resentment and revenge, corruption and lies – that they do not call for a competent government that can respond to crises or solve problems.
Trump hasn’t even tried to pretend he cares. He doesn’t seem interested in what Elon Musk will do as Secretary of Efficiency, or what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to do with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump needs Elon’s money for his campaign and he needed Kennedy’s support to get some Democratic and foreign votes. Musk spreads election lies on X and will be invited into Trump’s administration –even though he is one of the government’s largest contractors– to do what he wants and look after his own interests. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who rejects vaccines but has been invited to manage health policy at agencies across the government. Trump has said RFK can go “wild” and promised to let him manage “women’s health.” Voters know that Trump doesn’t care about health care or budget cuts.
According to new reporting by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic Oceancampaign officials managed to persuade Trump to use a new nickname for President Joe Biden that Trump wanted to launch after the disastrous June 27 debate: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
Yet he reacted angrily this summer when people complimented his campaign on its discipline, saying at a private fundraiser, “What does discipline have to do with winning?”
Trumpologists have spent nine years analyzing and discussing various theories about Trump’s superpowers — the reptilian brain, the ability to lie so openly while his supporters happily participate, how the Big Lie convinced millions of Americans that coordinated nefarious forces are merely controlled one election. and only at the top) instead of what they had always seen, their neighbors organizing thousands of decentralized elections, province by province.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos wrote in 2018:
Trump is a predator. When something enters its world, it eats it, kills it, or mates with it. That’s all his predatory instincts can do. The president’s primitive nature is the root of his narcissism. Trump’s immediate and voracious appetite allows for no concern for others or understanding of tomorrow. He reacts instinctively, not emotionally, morally or intellectually. He is insensitive to the truth and incapable of discipline or strategy.
The difference between 2018 and 2024 is that the people with the long resumes and Ivy League pedigrees who disciplined Trump in his first term are gone and exiled. This third presidential campaign has proven that Trump can no longer be contained.
Alberta concluded from its reporting: “At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown — and serves as a reminder of what left him what awaits him if he were to win on November 5.”
Trump’s power comes from us. Little by little, Americans have absorbed Trump’s onslaught and adapted, as humans do. And nine years after holding our political system hostage, Trump is now confident that, for enough of us, his identity is our identity; that we can tolerate and perhaps even enjoy the spectacle.
Enough of us need to show him and his party that he is wrong.